THE NEW YOR.KER. joint. The rest was missing; thick scar tissue ran all the way down what should have been the middle of his palm and wrist and into his forearm. His left hand never emerged from un- der his cloak, but I could see that it stopped at the knuckles. Three months after the Marine bombing, Moh- tashami had received a parcel contain- ing a book purported to be on Shiite holy places, and the parcel had ex- ploded when he opened it in his office in Iran's Embassy in Damascus. I asked him about details of Iran's assistance to Muslim groups elsewhere. "We have never directly, or even indirectly, supported the arguments of those opposition groups outside Iran," he said. "This, of course, does not mean that if a nation has been crushed by a foreign power and if it stands up and fights a foreign power we don't support this right. F or example, a man in Lebanon bombed Israeli soldiers in Tyre." The Israeli Defense Force headquarters in Tyre was bombed in 1983, killing twenty-eight Israeli troops and more than thirty Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. "His name was Ahmed Ghasir. Before we make a judgment about this, we have to look at the situation. He lost all his relations under Israeli boots and bombardment. We believe it is the right of other nations to defend them- selves." I checked the name to make sure I had it right, for the names and the backgrounds of the various Leba- nese suicide bombers were not gener- ally known. Mohtashami then wanted to go back to the earlier subject, specifically the United States. "America has no under- standing of our revolution," he said. "They are engulfed by their imagina- tion. One day, they say all Muslim movements and the Islamic revolution depend on the Imam's life. They think if the Imam passes away it is allover and finished. So many times they have published that the Imam is gone. It shows how weak they are and what problems they have." In reference to reports of a power struggle inside the government, he added, "Sometimes they think and speculate that among the rulers there are slight differences, and they enlarge this and feed people false ideas and say this will break or weaken the Islamic revolution. They feed thIS to the whole world. Their views of our revolution and our leader are wrong." I asked him about reports that he might be headed for a higher position -particularly with Presidential elec- tions scheduled for next year. In Iran, the President is limited to two terms in office, and President Khamenei win be stepping down in 1989, when many Iranians with whom I spoke anticipate a shakeup in the hierarchy, possibly including the Premiership and key Cabinet positions. "W e cannot speculate about the fu- ture, which is in the hands of the Iranian nation," Mohtashami said sol- emnly. "They will select those who have given more service." I had the impression, however, that he was pleased with the question. At the end of the interview, I asked Mohtashami if he had ever determined who had sent him the book bomb. He replied that Iran's best forensic experts had gone through the evidence and had concluded that it was a highly sophisti- cated device-one that he and the ex- perts believed could only have been concocted by the Americans or the Israelis. D ETERMINING the impact of Iran's power struggle is difficult for anyone outside the inner circle. I heard stories, for example, that Mohtashami had been known not to return Raf- sanjani's calls. There were detailed acco nts of an assassination attempt on Rafsanjani in June. Most versions agreed that at least one of his body- guards and from three to five of the assailants had been killed. There were differences of opinion about the iden- tity of the attackers, who were alleged to range from a Revolutionary Guard faction to malcontents in the Army, and even, in one account, to outsiders, including a Lebanese. None of these stories could be confirmed. That the divisions were indeed deep was indi- cated by an increasing number of public pleas for unity. In June, the Chief Justice of Iran's Supreme Court, Ayatollah Abdul Karim Musawi ) 69 Ardabili, warned, "If you people fail to be unanimous, this revolution, which is the great miracle of the century, made under the auspices of God, thanks to the Imam's leadership and with your selflessness, will collapse." The degree to which those divisions might be de- structive over the long term, however, was unclear. To untangle some of the disparate aspects of the revolution, I went to see Mohammad Javad Larijani, who is an affable man known for his candor and his familiarity with the Western idiom. Larijani is Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister, and since this, spring he has been in charge of the portfolio for the United States and Europe. His office in the ornate Foreign Ministry felt much like a professor's study: a dark wood desk was piled high, and a bit haphaz- ardly, with papers, charts, and books; pipe smoke filled the chamber. Before returning to work full time for the revolution, Larijani was a doctoral stu- dent in mathematics at Berkeley, and he told me that he still used his limited free time to instruct four graduate stu- dents at Teheran University. "We have a huge number of prob- lems, but they are our own problems," he said when I asked him about the Islamic Republic's internal politics. "There's a sense of authenticity. I know we're in trouble, but we are making the decisions. I love the sense of crisis sessions. None of us are angels; we are natural human beings. So we have power struggles, yes. But this sense of authenticity is the most fabu- lous thing we have. Everything else is secondary. We love it. Even if we make the wrong decision, it's ours." I told him that others in government had tried to play down factionalism. "It's impossible to believe that there are no factions in Islam, even in one sect of Islam," he said. "It would be a dull life if we all thought alike. There are factions in all respects-about the type of society, about the type of Is- lamic system, about the method of achieving those virtues. Definitely, we have factions." He laughed, and went on, "I spend a few hours every day thinking about the revolution. Solving hard mathematical problems is sometimes much easier. Take the first point, the conception of Islam," he said. "What is Islam? A fixed number of strictures and things? Or an authentic source of knowledge? There are very zealous and fierce peo-